Gallery Seven: The Superstar

Digital Shakespeare

Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything

Sans binding, sans text, sans pages! Senate House Library is proud to hold early editions of Shakespeare, with all the richness of textual variants and of artefactual value, of paper, of bindings, and of centuries of individual history and ownership. But the text of these editions has become more accessible than ever. You can now access digital texts online, with multimedia interpretations to bring them to life.

1992

The first Shakespeare Electronic Archive was launched at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1992, and produced the first digitized text of a First Folio for presentation online.

1997

Five years later, Arden Shakespeare published a complete First Folio on CD-ROM, the first such commercially available product.

As part of the rapid expansion of Internet resources at the end of the twentieth century, Early English Books Online placed electronic images of all early modern editions of Shakespeare within the reach of readers in hundreds of libraries.

Thereafter the process of digitizing Shakespearean text has become commonplace, with the First Folio discovered in St Omer, France in 2014 published as a fully digitized copy the following year and the Folger Library currently curating an online exhibition of digitized Shakespearean documents www.shakespearedocumented.org.

Creating Shakespeare

As part of our Shakespeare: Metamorphosis season, Senate House Library invites you to recite, record and upload your favourite Shakespearean quotes or poems and contribute to the digital future of the Bard’s work. You can use our Instagram or Twitter feeds to share your performance – after all, as Shakespeare himself wrote, All the world’s a stage…